The Dancer Upstairs by Nicholas Shakespeare

Author:Nicholas Shakespeare [Nicholas Shakespeare]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2005-11-03T05:00:00+00:00

10

On the morning I left for La Posta, Laura sidled into the bedroom. She was miserable. Children hold adults to their promises.

“Look.” I watched her through the camera. “I’ll take masses of photos for you.”

Her face hardened.

“I’ll bring you a flute – like the one I used to play. I promise.”

She said nothing.

“The military have declared it an emergency zone, Laura.”

To prove that she was the child I took her for, she locked herself in her room and sang aloud to the cat.

Sylvina drove me to the airport. An unusual peace had settled on her, and on the city we passed through. If you live with violence you become acclimatized to it. After a car bomb, people will jog round the dead bodies. They will go to their tennis courts. One of Sylvina’s cousins, to circumvent the curfew, had bought a second-hand ambulance to transport his friends to parties. There is a routine even to menace.

As we drove past the Inca Market, Sylvina said, “Agustín, I have a way we can make money.”

She had been discussing our problems with Marco. She knew I’d be cross, which is why she waited until this moment to talk about it. The fact was, Marco had come up with a fail-safe plan for us to become millionaires. In the vague terms in which I grasped it, Marco’s solution – upon which, shortly, all her hopes would fix – required Sylvina to sell certain beauty products to her friends and induce them to do likewise while taking a percentage.

“If you persuade people to work for you, you get ten per cent of everything they sell, so if they sell fifty dollars I receive five dollars, and if they in turn find two people to work for them, eventually I’ll be at the top of the pyramid and it can’t fail.” A lavender Cadillac seemed to be involved at some point, because she brought up that again after the engine stalled at the security checkpoint.

“Marco’s obsessed with it. Just in his own street two women have made millions.”

We kissed through the car window. “You know what communications are like in the sierra,” I said. “But I’ll try to ring.”

“Anyway, Marco’s sending me a sample kit.”

I flew in a military transport to Cajamarca, from where I caught a lift with a lorry heading north. The driver was a round, thick-set man with an overhanging forehead and huge, offended eyes. We left for the mountains that night, splashing out through the mud, our headlamps shedding a watery dazzle in the pelting rain.

The truck had been climbing for three hours when Ezequiel struck. We were approaching a high pass, and the driver was telling me about his family, killed by the police. I sat, appalled, watching a bank of mist nudge into the sweep of our lights.

He said he knew the policeman who had killed them, knew his name and nickname, knew where he lived. Every night since his wife and daughters had been found in a sheep field,

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